What's a TopologicalAddress?
The CAKE protocol has addresses that are PublicKeyID. These identifiers have no information at all as to where you might find the holder of the address. This makes things difficult for protocol routing.
In order to make routing possible, it would be nice to have some way to associate a PublicKeyID with an address in a protocol that you already know how to route.
Routing typically involves looking at some portion of the address to decide where the information should go next. So, addresses in protocols that can be efficiently routed typically encode information about the network topology within themselves. Hence, they are TopologicalAddresses.
The CAKESubProtocol that (among other things) keeps track of this mapping (using LocationAssertions) is the CAKENIP protocol.
Example TopologicalAddresses
An SMTP address, such a god@heaven.gov (DNS names (like heaven.gov) indirectly encode topological information).
A protocol/IP address/port # combo, like UDP/208.42.65.33/53 for a DNS server, or TCP/208.42.65.33/22 for an SSH server.
An AIM handle.